Earlier today we discussed Android’s dominance of the mobile phone market. However, that dominance doesn’t translate to dollars for Android app developers. A report issued today from Flurry Analytics claims despite the massive lead built up by Android’s success, the platform hasn’t captured nearly as much as the spending associated with mobile apps.

“Anecdotally, developers consistently tell us that they make more money on iOS,” writes Peter Farago on the Flurry Blog. “About three to four times as much.”

Flurry attempted to back-up those anecdotes with numbers from its analytics source. More than 135,000 apps use Flurry, and the company found that support for new Android development dropped from 37 percent at the beginning of the year to 27 percent today. That doesn’t paint a full picture, but it is one signal that Android might not make as many gains among developers as it should given the number of consumers using the OS. (Flurry suggests iPad2 success and wider iPhone availability contributes to the iOS favoritism.)

A one-to-one comparison was drawn between revenue from in-app purchases among popular apps available on both Android and iOS. Flurry calculates that for every $1 the iOS app generates, only $0.24 is earned on Android. That could likely be explained by iOS having a more mature payment system and more familiarity with in-app upgrades, but it’s still a sizable gap. TechCrunch notes that Flurry doesn’t reveal the sample size, so you can’t really be sure of these results’ trustworthiness, but it’s hard to overlook such a gap even if the sample size was just the Top 10 apps available on both Android and iOS.

Why is this important? Because apps make or break a mobile OS. Despite Google being among the most widely-used apps, the best apps come from third party developers. Plenty of people wouldn’t stick around with Android if they couldn’t get Pandora or one of its many rivals. Plenty of people wouldn’t convert to Android if it meant giving up that app that they have come to love. And if users want to keep seeing more great apps to choose from, it’s imperative that developers believe they will be able to make a living on Android.

11 Comments

So an Apple product milks customers for more money than its Google counterpart. What's new? Seriously though, the statistics Flurry is quoting are for in-app purchases, and ONLY for devs that are using Flurry's analytics. Can you really come to any meaningful conclusions from that subset of data? This whole analysis just screams "Apple Bias" to me. Why did they only pull in-app purchase data instead of total revenue (app purchase, ad revenue, in-app purchase)? Would total revenue not be a much more valid statistic to use when trying to come to a conclusion about which OS is more profitable?

When you are crazy enough to buy a expensive phone with many functions you will never use then you crazy enough to buy Apps which you never need… this is the success story of iPhone and iPad and their market. We all know this and don't need a analyze from Flurry for it…

Android still produces a lot of money. There's a lot of work being put into cross platform programming. As long as Google supports efforts for developers to be able to easily port their games, then developers will launch in the market. I may misunderstand since I'm not a dev, but I though that's the big thing with ICS. You only need one app for all devices and it is easily ported from iOS.

maybe it'll start earning some money from apps, when they will start putting some innovation into it. I have expected something greater than Android from Google, they had great innovations in their history, but Android is just like copying the status-quo from desktops. Maybe they will do better with Google+. I think Chorme & Android are Google+ hope. http://baretech.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/the-migh… My recent post The mighty will fall – Google isn’t innovative in mobile

This is one of the very reasons why I had my carrier buy back my two month old iPhone 4s and I got an epic touch instead. There are few free apps. There are even less trial apps of a paid version. A lot of the apps are pay for. There’s no refunds for the app store. I’ve wasted too much money on apps that, despite the good ratings or attractive screen shots and descriptions, was not exactly what I was looking for. Many of the apps I bought I wondered how the hell it got such great reviews despite it being utterly garbage. It was rare that an app developer would answer your email questions or issues. The app store may have quantity but comparing it to the market, the ratio of quality isn’t there. Lastly, the prices of some of the apps in apple’s store were too high for what you were getting as an app. Many of the apps were huge file sizes for a phone program. I commented once that there are operating systems out there that are smaller than some phone apps for the iPhone. I liked the hardware but I hated the app store and apple’s heavy censorship.